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The world's largest particle collider being completed on the French-Swiss border is set for its first test in November.

But scientists are already looking at building the next big particle-smashing machine.

The Large Hadron Collider, a project 13 years in the making, should be completed in August and start operating at a low energy level by the end of this year, says Dr Philip Bryant, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The huge circular tunnel is 27 kilometres in circumference and it's designed to smash protons into each other at extremely high speeds, trying to replicate in miniature the events of the Big Bang.

Physicists hope the particle collider will answer crucial questions such as how matter was created and what gives mass to matter.

Yet even before the first proton collides with another, physicists are dreaming up the next big machine, this one an International Linear Collider that would give physicists a more refined tool for exploring the mysteries of the universe.

"This will not have more power, but more precision," says Professor Jonathan Bagger of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The International Linear Collider would consist of two 20 kilometre linear accelerators lined up face to face.

They would shoot some 10 billion electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, toward each other at nearly the speed of light.

The straight-line collider would eliminate some of the energy wasted in the circular electron accelerators, allowing physicists to see new particles in unprecedented detail.

The collision of those beams would create an array of new particles.

Bagger says he is eager to find what can be learned by the "crisp, precise beams of this machine".

The International Linear Collider, proposed by physicists from Europe, Asia and the Americas, is still in the planning stages and does not yet have a home.

"This machine will really be the first global accelerator," Bagger says.

At a projected cost of nearly US$7 billion, a lot is riding on funding, something that appears to be in short supply.

Nobel laureate Professor Burton Richter of Stanford University, speaking in a panel on the future of particle physics at the meeting, sounded alarm at the apparent lack of funding for such super-colliding machines.

"We're in the middle of a particle physics revolution," Richter says.

"The next 10-15 years will answer many questions and raise new ones," Richter says.

"Regrettably, the experiments are bigger and more expensive ... so finance will limit the pace of discovery."

Richter says the International Linear Collider could be operational in 2012, provided it won enough international support.